Elon Musk is being accused of completely missing the point of the satirical 1997 sci-fi action movie Starship Troopers after referencing it when celebrating his new role in Donald Trump’s administration.

The tech entrepreneur and billionaire played a major role in helping Trump win the 2024 US election and has now been appointed as the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, along with Vivek Ramaswamy.

“We are very grateful to the thousands of Americans who have expressed interest in helping us at DOGE,” the group wrote on X on Thursday. “We don’t need more part-time idea generators. We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting. If that’s you, DM this account with your CV. Elon & Vivek will review the top one per cent of applicants.”

In the aftermath of the announcement, Musk shared a meme aimed at the so-called “big government machine” claiming that “It’s afraid.”

Musk then shared an image from a climactic scene in Starship Troopers where Neil Patrick Harris’s character, Carl Jenkins, triumphantly claims victory over their alien bug enemies.

On the surface, this is a fairly common cinematic trope but Starship Troopers, made by Dutch provocateur Paul Verhoeven and adapted from a novel by Robert A Heinlein, has a very obvious twist that Musk appears to have missed.

The subverted message of the film is that the supposed heroic humans, that we have followed throughout the movie, are actually fascists and are committing genocide against the bugs.

It’s not a hard message to miss as numerous military propaganda videos, emulating scenes from The Triumph of the Will, are played throughout the film, with the humans even wearing uniforms inspired by those worn by the Nazis and Italy’s National Fascist Party.

“I want to make a movie so painfully obvious in its satire that everyone who understands it lives in perpetual psychological torment inflicted on them by all the people who don’t,” said Verhoeven, in a quote attributed to him.

Therefore, Musk comparing himself to the bad guys in Starship Troopers is perhaps not the message that the 53-year-old was hoping to convey.

Musk shared the post on 14 November and it has since been shared more than 26,000 times with many people saying the same thing.

One person sarcastically wrote: “When you understand things and what they mean.”

Another X/Twitter user said: “My favourite genre of Elon tweet is ‘doesn’t understand the source material.’”

A third added: “Please never stop right-wingers missing that Starship Troopers was satire.”

A fourth person joked: “I’m not sure, considering the fairly obvious undertones of what the military represents in this film, that this is the statement he thinks it is.”

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